Primate Lit: On Suspension of Disbelief and Monkeys in Fiction

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about stories with monkeys. I’ve been thinking about them for a while, actually, but until now it’s been a mostly passive project. Maybe “project” is too lofty a term. I haven’t really been looking for these stories. I haven’t been actively keeping track of them. Occasionally, though, I’ll come across one, or I’ll remember one that I read years ago. Basically, I’ve just been noticing them — monkeys — and for whatever reason they’ve had a tendency to linger in my mind. It wasn’t until recently, when I re-read “A Girl with a Monkey” by Leonard Michaels, that all of these monkeys began to organize themselves.

Currently I have two main categories. The first involves stories that feature monkeys as prominent characters or focal points. Haruki Murakami’s “A Shinagawa Monkey,” for example, in which a woman keeps forgetting her name, and as the story unravels we see that really the woman isn’t “forgetting” her name at all — it’s being stolen by a monkey. Or take the title story of Lydia Millet’sLove in Infant Monkeys or George Saunders’s “93990,” from In Persuasion Nation, which both use monkeys to get at issues of scientific experimentation and animal cruelty. Or Andrew Alexander’s “Little Bitty Pretty One,” which first appeared in Mississippi Review and which I encountered in 1999’s New Stories from the South. Alexander’s story begins, “My sister once ordered a monkey from the back of a comic book,” and over the course of the story — only a few pages — we witness the monkey’s life in the house, from its arrival via the mail to its burial in the backyard, and we get to know the narrator and his family in a way that would not have been possible without that monkey. What all of the stories in this category have in common, I would argue, is that their very existence depends on their monkeys. Sure, they could have been written without them — with rabbits, say — but without the primate-primate connection between monkey and human — human character and human reader both — these stories wouldn’t be the same at all.

And this first category is also where I would place books like Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Benjamin Hale’s The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, two different takes on the “civilized” primate attempting to navigate the human world, in the tradition of Franz Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” but these are chimpanzee stories, and technically chimpanzees are not monkeys — chimps being Great Apes, along with gorillas and humans and orangutans, while the many varieties of monkey are a big branch or two away on the primate family tree — but I fear we’re already getting off track here.

I fear, too, that this first category might seem a bit too simple, obvious, reductive. It might feel like a catch-all, an easy way of dealing with an enormously ranging assortment — stories that use monkeys for laughs, for sympathy, for mystery. It’s a category that, if the doors were open to film, could comfortably house things as disparate as Monkey Trouble and Planet of the Apes, which I’ll admit might strike some as problematic, but here again I’ll argue that what both of these stories depend on — wherefrom they derive either their comedy or their terror — is that primate-primate connection. Insert humans and the stories fall apart; insert another type of animal and the stories fall apart.

It’s the second category, though, that I’m most interested in. Here we have stories that don’t ask so much of their monkeys, stories that could arguably exist without these animals and suffer no serious loss of esteem. I’m speaking now of stories like Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The focus with this one is usually The Misfit or the grandmother or the gruesome finale, but what I appreciate is the quieter oddity of moments like the family’s arrival at Red Sammy’s restaurant, where there’s “a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a chinaberry tree.” The monkey gets four sentences. We see him retreat into the branches of his tree as the family approaches, and as the family exits, we see him again, “busy catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.” And that’s all — just a roadside monkey, a strange little sight along the road to doom.

There’s also Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs,” another often-anthologized piece, the story of Earl, car thief and writer of bad checks. The story starts with Earl fleeing Montana — headed south in a stolen Mercedes with his girlfriend, his daughter, and his daughter’s dog Duke — and it ends later that night, not much farther south, with Earl musing alone in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn, asking the reader to join him in wondering about how it is that we end up in the places that we do. This has always struck me as a bold move, this ending, a risky move on the part of the author. My favorite scene, though, happens early on, when Earl’s girlfriend, Edna, pours herself a drink in the passenger seat and says, apropos of nothing, “Did I ever tell you I once had a monkey?”

Then for two pages Edna explains how she won a spider monkey in a dice game, how after a week she “got the creeps” and couldn’t handle the monkey staring at her at night anymore, so she “went out to the car, got a length of clothesline wire, and came back in and wired her to the doorknob through her little silver collar, then went back and tried to sleep.” And then when Edna woke up, she found that the monkey “had tipped off her chair-back and hanged herself on the wire line.”

To me it’s the most emotionally affecting moment in the story, much more so than any of the human drama. And it’s also a moment that allows for the most intriguing instance of characterization for Earl: when Edna finishes her story, describing how she put the monkey in a trash bag and took it to the dump, Earl says, “Well, that’s horrible,” which is obvious and true. But then he goes on: “But I don’t see what else you could do. You didn’t mean to kill it. You’d have done it differently if you had.”

You’d have done it differently if you had — gets me every time. There are countless ways Earl could have responded in this moment — he could’ve stopped with “You didn’t mean to kill it,” which would have, again, been obvious and true, perhaps even reassuring in its banality — but instead this is the way Earl seeks to console, by pointing out that there exist other, more purposeful ways a person might choose to kill a monkey.

As much as I value this scene, though, as much as I appreciate this unsettling peek at Earl’s character, I doubt anyone would argue that Edna’s monkey plays any real, significant role in the story’s plot. Same for the monkey outside of Red Sammy’s place. But I do think these monkeys have utility in terms of narrative. In O’Connor’s story, if nothing else, that monkey has an atmospheric effect. It tips the narrative universe just a bit further off-kilter. In a world where it’s possible to find a monkey chained to a tree beside a highway restaurant — and for that fact to warrant not a whole lot of attention, for that monkey to seem more or less ordinary — maybe it’s also possible, or at least less unlikely, to end up crossing paths with the escaped convict you read about in that morning’s newspaper. There are other things O’Connor does to make that crossing of paths seem plausible, other bits of foreshadowing and so on, but, to my mind, there’s a certain expansion of possibility that occurs with that monkey around. And you could say the same for Ford’s story: what can’t happen in Edna’s life, or in the world of the story, if it’s the sort of place where a person might roll some dice in a bar one day and wind up the reluctant owner of a monkey?

Then there’s the Leonard Michaels story “A Girl with a Monkey,” which I now see as a sort of pinnacle in my type-two classification of monkey stories. It’s the story of a man named Beard, an American traveling alone in Germany, who falls in love with a woman named Inger. Inger is a prostitute, she takes “classes in paper restoration at the local museum,” and she has a monkey. The monkey never actually appears on the page though. It gets referred to occasionally in conversation, as when, during a disagreement over whether Inger will go home for the evening or spend a third night in the company of Beard, he says, “I’m not your monkey.” To which Inger says, “You think you’re more complicated.”

And this isn’t the only place where a reader might feel compelled to compare Beard to an ape. There’s a baseness to his character, and that combination of the tender and the grotesque that Leonard Michaels’s characters often have — it’s easy to imagine a reader saying, “Oh, I get it — it’s Beard that’s the ‘monkey’ here, he’s an animal…” And it’s true that along those lines the story does have things to say about distinctions between humans and animals, notions of innocence and purity and ownership and whether or not “all sentient beings were equivalent.”

There’s something happening, too, at the intersection of the animalistic and the sexual. We see it creeping up when Beard “remembered that Inger had talked about her monkey. The memory stirred him, as he had been stirred in the restaurant, with sexual desire. Nothing could be more plain, more real. It thrust against the front of his trousers. He went into a café to sit for a while and pretend to read a newspaper.”

No doubt there are significant discussions to be had about these things, important conversations both literary and sociological, but here again I’m more interested in the monkey’s effect on the story’s atmosphere, which is very real even if the monkey itself never appears.

The closest we come to actually seeing this animal is when Beard goes to meet Inger at her apartment. But Inger isn’t there. Instead Beard finds her roommate, Greta, who has no idea where Inger is. Beard doesn’t believe this, but Greta insists. She tells him, “Please go look for yourself. No clothes in her closet, no suitcase, no bicycle.” And the monkey is gone too, the monkey we never see and whose very existence we’d have cause to doubt if not for Greta. “I was an idiot to let her move in,” Greta says, “a girl with a monkey.”

Again, in no way does the story’s plot depend on this monkey. The story could very nearly exist as is with each mention of the word “monkey” replaced with “goldfish” or “parakeet” or “turtle.” That monkey has an effect, though. It sets the story in a world in which a young woman might have a monkey as a pet, for one thing, which, yes, I realize, can and does happen in reality, but there’s something more going on here. There’s something about how little attention that monkey gets — from Inger, from Beard, from the narrator — how ordinary it seems. Never once does Beard say something like, “Wait, what? You have a monkey? Are you serious? Where’d you get it? Can I see it?” All of which would be reasonable responses, I think, in the world that I live in. Maybe this downplaying speaks to the degree of attraction and obsession Beard feels — his feelings for Inger are all-consuming, tunnel-vision-inducing to the point that he can’t even register the oddity of her having a monkey waiting for her at home. The whole thing has a way of making me feel like there’s something wrong with me, because it seems like I’m the only one who sees something strange going on here. I mean, the story isn’t even called “The Girl with the Monkey,” an article-shift that would confer some uniqueness to the situation. It’s “A Girl with a Monkey,” as in, possibly, one of many. But the story is confident — it takes the monkey as a given and moves on, and so I do too.

There are echoes of Anton Chekhov’s lady and her pet dog here too, I think, another story of a man surprising himself with his devotion to a woman he meets abroad. There’s nothing remarkable about a dog as a pet though, and there’s nothing remarkable about the way Chekhov’s story winds up either — by which I mean the events are entirely believable, inevitable, deflating, and saddening in exactly the way that life can be — though there is certainly something remarkable about the way Chekhov so deftly executes that ending.

But there is something remarkable about the way in which “A Girl with a Monkey” comes to a close, with Beard hoping for one thing and finding something better — something approaching the unlikelihood of a faulty memory leading to a wrong turn, which then leads to a startled cat leaping from a basket, which leads to a car accident, which leads to a run-in with an infamous criminal — and what I’m thinking now is that maybe it’s the monkey that allows such things to happen. Improbable animals priming us for improbable events. It isn’t just a matter of the strange being made to seem ordinary, it’s a matter of the extraordinary being made to seem possible.

Daniel O'Malley
's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridian, Alaska Quarterly Review, Third Coast, and The Baltimore Review, among other publications, and his work has been cited as notable in the Best American Nonrequired Reading series. He currently lives in Huntington, W.V., where he teaches at Marshall University.

I don’t put much stock in the New Years resolution – I don’t think you need the calendar to dictate self-improvement – however, I will acknowledge (and have acknowledged in the past) that the dawning of a new year does seem like an opportune moment to try out something new. In fact, The Millions was the offspring of a New Years resolution in 2003.As 2002 drew to a close, I bought myself a Moleskine notebook and resolved, as I had many times in the past, to begin keeping a journal. It started off reasonably well, but it was soon clear that this resolution was taking the trajectory of so many others: strict adherence to the plan at the outset followed by swiftly plummeting interest. One thing I did keep up with, in this little journal of mine, was making note of the books I’d been reading.I eventually switched from writing in the journal to writing for the blog to see if that would motivate me (after fits and starts, it did). But it was the idea of keeping track of and reflecting on what I read that helped inspire The Millions and gave purpose to what I read. It also made me a much better reader.The obvious reading-related resolution is to read “x” number of books this year or to finally tackle Proust or Pynchon, but committing yourself to just keep track of what you read and trying to jot down a few words about each book may have a longer lasting impact on who you are as a reader. It all goes back to the notion that we can only read a finite number of good books in our lifetime, so we may as well make the most of them, even if that means just keeping a list so you can jog your memory and recall the experience of reading this or that book. At its best, reflecting on what you read better enables you to take what is essentially a solitary pastime and use it to build a library of knowledge to mull over and share. Happy New Year, everyone!

1.
One of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had in the past couple years involves three encounters with the work of Haruki Murakami. In isolation, I would not have considered any one of them to have been revelatory but all together they comprised a unique way of getting to know an author and left me with several ideas that have affected the way I think about my day-to-day life.

I was introduced to Murakami when The New Yorker published an essay called “The Running Novelist” that was an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The piece appeared in the late spring, at the time of the year when I am traditionally most enthusiastic about running, and it was fronted by an illustration of Murakami in his marathon gear that caught my eye.

The essay described how when he was thirty Murakami remade himself from a jazz club owner into a novelist. The process did not happen all at once. He wrote his first novel in the predawn hours after he’d finished tallying receipts and washing down the bar. His writing sessions sometimes lasted only half an hour, at which point he’d fall asleep. Even under those conditions Murakami was able to mine the talent that would eventually make him famous. He submitted his manuscript, later titled Hear the Wind Sing, to a contest for aspiring novelists. Some months later he found out he’d won.

Over the next two years Murakami wrote two more novels in this same way (Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase) but eventually he realized there were limits to what he could accomplish so long as writing remained a secondary activity in his life. When he was thirty-two Murakami sold his jazz club and with his wife moved to Narashino, a rural town fifteen miles outside of Tokyo. There he set about reordering his life. He began waking up around the time he’d formerly gone to bed and went to sleep when the sun set. He gave up alcohol and meat, cut down on rice, and “decided that from then on we’d try to see only the people we wanted to see, and, as much as possible, get by without seeing those we didn’t.” He would write in the morning, do errands in the afternoon, and read at night. He started running every day.

What appealed to me most about Murakami’s essay was the way it joined something very big, like writing a novel, with something very small, like what time each day to go to bed. I was twenty-seven at the time and still very much befuddled by the large-scale project of adult life. Murakami’s essay was not a panacea, but it did sketch a type of path that I thought I might be capable of following. While I may not have known exactly what I wanted from the next fifty years, with a little reflection I could parse the minor decisions in my days—what to eat, who to see, how to spend the last hour before bed. I hoped, maybe against odds, that the answers to larger questions would resolve themselves out of the gradual buildup of small but deliberate choices.

2.
My next encounter with Murakami took place a year later—in August 2009—when I finally got around to reading his memoir. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a short book (I read it in a single night) that is framed by Murakami’s preparation for the 2005 New York Marathon and gathers together his reflections on his more than thirty years as a writer and a runner.

The prose in the memoir is spare even by Murakami standards. Not all reviewers were taken with this approach—one said of the book, “It’s not bad, but it’s sort of ordinary and doesn’t amount to much”—but I thought the straightforward writing allowed What I Talk About to feel notably honest. Running is a simple pursuit and Murakami presents himself as an unadorned man and it made sense to me that the style of the book would reflect those facts.

There is one particular piece from What I Talk About that has stayed with me in the ten months since I finished reading the book. It is Murakami talking about the initial stages of training for a marathon:
To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed–and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.
In the same way that people pace a marathon by thinking about how fast they want to run each mile, I think Murakami paces his life by thinking about what actions, in what quantity, and in what order he wants to be part of his daily routine.

It’s a seductive idea once you think about it—and I’d say I’ve thought about it almost every day since reading What I Talk About. “[G]etting the flywheel to spin at a set speed” applies to running, of course, and to writing, but also to endeavors like being nice or raising a child that are less amenable to being broken down into unit measurements. It’s definitely not an approach for everyone. In the same way that a lot of people find distance running to be tedious, the routine and austerity of Murakami’s days might seem to lack an essential zest. But for anyone who has a hard time seeing how today fits with the rest of his life, I think this way of looking at things makes a lot of sense.

3.After reading Murakami’s memoir, I was eager to try his fiction—I wanted to see what types of stories grew out of the mind of the deliberate, self-aware runner I’d been introduced to in What I Talk About. In February I went to the branch of the Philadelphia Free Library near my apartment and scanned the shelves until I found Murakami’s name. The only book the library had in at that time was Kafka on the Shore.

It does not take much imagination to figure that Kafka and What I Talk About were written by the same person. The protagonists in the two books are both best pictured alone, on a journey to a place they have not yet identified. Music features prominently in both stories, and while What I Talk About is hardly sensual, I thought that the way Murakami described the bounce of a coed’s ponytail as she ran past him along the Charles River foreshadowed the sexuality in Kafka. Both books are also distinguished for the way that they engage primary emotions that other writers might consider too cliché to confront head on.

Just as with What I Talk About, there is a single passage from Kafka that has stayed with since I finished the book. It is Kafka speaking to a woman named Miss Saeki who he is in love with, and it was here that the connection between Murakami the memoirist and Murakami the novelist was most clear to me. Kafka says:
“The strength I’m looking for isn’t the kind where you win or lose. I’m not after a wall that’ll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things—unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.”
Here I think Kafka is giving voice to the reasons why Murakami runs and tries to be so purposeful about his days. It is easy, in the face of the hard moments that feature in any life, to come unmoored from the ways of thinking, feeling and acting we’d otherwise want for ourselves. But there are also ways to fight back, and I think this is what Murakami—and anyone else—stands to gain from careful attention to the shape of the day. As he put it in his New Yorker essay, “[L]ife is basically unfair. But, even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness.”

1.The Bolsheviks shot ’em, chopped ’em up, threw ’em in a hole, poured acid on ’em. This was my high-school History teacher’s recounting of the Romanov murders. He sat at the back of the classroom grading while we watched a video, the people of the early 20th century jerking along soundlessly in black and white. Then the finish: the forest of today, grown up where the scattered royal bodies had recently been found and DNA-tested, proving the story was all real. In spite of two of the skeletons being missing, this was passed off as a happy ending.

Grigori Rasputin came up too, of course, and took over. They couldn’t kill him. Poisoned him. Shot him. Clubbed him. Tied him up and threw him in the water. Intrigued by the whiff of the dark, I wrote a long, galloping essay about him. I stared at his stark photographs in books, sucking up descriptions. He smelled like a goat, and always had food in his beard, yet was extremely attractive to women. He looked that way. Like someone who stank and didn’t care, whose lack of caring was behind his ability to get any woman naked in a hurry. Under his caveman brow, his eyes were pale and startling. “A flaming glow,” as Boney M. put it in the song about him and the Russian queen. My parents had the album.

I could see how the eyes got to that queen (another Alix, as I noted with a thrill). I’m sure I included them in the essay. I got a B, and was irritated. I was usually an A student, a prim compiler of what teachers wanted to hear. “Great! A little inconclusive,” the teacher wrote in red. There was something I clearly hadn’t gotten at. Something I didn’t see, or didn’t yet know how to write about. And didn’t know was coming.

2.
This year, I didn’t see Donald Trump’s election win coming either. At home in British Columbia, watching poll results on my phone half the night, I drifted into bleary memories of high school, of sadistic boys, of History class. Rasputin floated up again when I skimmed an article about Trump seeking to bro down with Vladimir Putin. Trump is no Mad Monk, but there are other similarities. Like Rasputin, he projects himself as a “man of the people” with heroic powers, including the ability to transform a sick country into a healthy one. Like Trump, Rasputin was proud of his genitals, and enjoyed grabbing and kissing and firing others once he got some governmental clout. And both he and Trump show themselves as ringmasters of narrative: they tell their own heroic stories, and reroute everyone else’s.

That’s especially true of women’s stories. Aside from persuading the queen that he was cousin to Jesus Christ and knew everything she was thinking, Rasputin told “my little ladies” that sleeping with him wasn’t the sin they had been brought up to believe, but conversely, a sin-removing act. Trump is similarly possessive about “my women,” but is a less subtle deflector. We’ve all heard his “Pussygate” responses: the accusers are wrong, the assaults never happened, they’re liars. This technique spreads easily. When his campaign manager was accused of aggressively grabbing a female reporter by the arm, Trump said, “Perhaps she made the story up. I think that’s what happened.” It goes beyond gaslighting; it’s a rewrite, or a writing-over.

Like many people who’ve been sexually abused, I’ve gone over and over my past in my mind, keeping it mainly to myself. And like them, I’ve felt chewed up and spat out by this presidential victory and what it’s peeled away from the world. A lot of women I know have said the election result feels personal, and it has surely reanimated old occurrences for us, things we thought were dead. Inconclusive things. Things with zombie afterlives that are difficult to tell. Here’s one of them.

3.
All the things you don’t remember line themselves up first. After watching so much political posturing, I now feel the need to note that, to defend my honesty upfront.

I don’t remember leaving the party at the house near the river in Oxford, where all my A’s had taken me. I was studying English Literature there at the end of the 1990s. I don’t remember getting back to my college closer to town, going up the stairs to my room, putting the key in the lock, turning on the lamp inside. He must have been with me all the way. I feel the need to list details, too. There were three flights of stairs. He was in a tux, I was in a long gown. Oxford parties often required oddly formal dress, and we’d sit around on the floor drinking like that, as though we were minor Russian royals from some other time.

I look for connections, trying to give this story a shape.

I don’t remember what we talked about, walking over the cobbled street in the cool winter night. We must have talked. I do remember sitting on my small couch chatting about families. I liked talking about mine then, with anyone who would listen. And complaining about things wrong with England: the eyedropper pressure of the showers, the clerks’ pain upon eye contact at the grocery store. I was very obviously homesick. I’ve wondered since if that marked me.

He wasn’t Russian or American. He was English. I can’t remember his eye colour. He had glasses.

My room looked out onto the shoulder of the chapel next to the quad. It was late, it was dark, as we sat by the windows. I do remember being cheerfully drunk, amused. I don’t remember us getting into my narrow bed. I don’t remember how we started kissing. I do remember stopping and telling him, “I don’t want to have sex with you.” His odd compliments: You’re so feminine. You’re so female.

How I ended up out of my rustling pewter ballgown: No.

His weight: Yes.

The pain when he pushed into me: Yes.

I said nothing else, except asking him to finish, so it would stop. He did, and fell heavily asleep with his arm over me, blurting out Bloody fucking in his dreams, twice. I had wavery, still-drunk thoughts about pregnancy and disease. These seemed to be far away but coming, trains that had left their stations. I held very still.

I remember him leaving in the earliest morning with a kiss and his number, and me going along with it, already deciding this script would make things better, though I felt like a wasteland. Chopped up and thrown in a hole and covered in acid, yes. Him calling later to say, “I owe you an apology. I’m sorry I raped you.” His voice was slightly abashed in that English way, permanently level. And me trying to figure out what to reply.

No words came to mind. I still hadn’t slept. I was sitting at my desk, trying to work, with the heavy curtains closed against the white sky. I’d taken a shower, avoiding thinking about what I was washing away. I’d stripped the navy sheets from the bed and taken them straight downstairs to the laundry. He stayed on the phone a while, mentioned his girlfriend, how he had one, yeah, and he was sorry about that too. I’m not sure which seemed worse to me at that moment.

Then all I did was think, for weeks. All the old donkeys trotted out in the service of rape explanations. Your fault, your drunkenness, your strapless dress, your taking him to your room, your kissing him back, men can’t help themselves, men can’t stop themselves, nobody knocked you unconscious, it wasn’t your first time, you asked him to finish, you must have wanted him. And others, less clear. Your unanchored need. You wanted to talk with him, you wanted to meet someone, the cute story, the happy end. Isn’t that why you went to parties?

Via email, I blurted out a summarized version to a guy I knew, as if a male witness would cement it. His reaction: Are you sure? Rape-rape? I had nothing to say to that either. I think I wrote the rapist a blistering email at some point. But I’m not sure I sent it. My Oxford email address disappeared years ago, so I can’t check. Are you sure? That question never dies.

I tried to go on working, too, making a thesis out of piles of 19th-century research. In the Bodleian Library — everyone called it the Bod, which now made me queasy — I felt swallowed up. Waiting for my books to be delivered to my desk, I looked up at the faces of ancient greats painted high on the walls. Ovid was one. I remembered first reading his Metamorphoses as an undergrad back home in Canada. The people changed into rocks and trees and animals still felt human, still had human emotion, but nowhere to put it now. The back of my brain wondered: How was I changed? It was the same stew of disbelief and fascination I knew from reading fairy tales all my life, Russian or German or Irish, the ones that kept turning up in my research now. Girl into bird, sister into deer, queen into witch. How did it happen? What happened to her after that?

4.
The morning after Trump’s victory, I posted a broken heart on my Facebook feed. I usually hate emojis, but I was out of words, tired and blasted, as if it were again the morning after in Oxford. Another memory circled: the day, weeks later, when I was brusquely declared clear of pregnancy and sickness by the clinic, and went back to work in the library with a goodie bag of condoms they’d handed me. It felt like an ending, though it wasn’t, there isn’t one. Looking at that Facebook heart, I wanted to write my story, all of it, in point form or tweets or emojis, sure. Something shapeless.

Trump’s campaign brought the prevalence of sexual assault into the open, and then brushed it away. It felt like a nation turning its eyes on victims and asking what my male friend asked me: Are you sure? You’re not sure. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. There are other issues. Turn the page, tear it out, write it better.

He tells it like it is.

The subtext of that favorite comment of Trump supporters is this: That isn’t the story. He’s telling the story. Their impatience for the victory, the desired finish, is palpable. Trump has always wanted to keep hold of the narrative, saying, for instance, that he would be the one to “reveal all” about his accusers after the election. Rasputin did the same, teasing his followers along with opaque predictions about the future. After a financial fall in 1997, Trump declared, “Anyone who thinks my story is anywhere near over is sadly mistaken,” like Rasputin undying, staggering up from poison and bullets, controlling the tale until the absolute end.

1.
In Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty, a louche writer named Jep Gambardella, spends much of his time strolling through the cobble-stone streets of Rome and soaking up impressions and experience, that will figure, we assume, in a long-delayed follow-up to his first acclaimed novel. He reflects on the ineffable qualities that mark good writing.

“As kids, my friends always gave the same answer: ‘Pussy’,” Jep recalls. “Whereas I answered ‘The smell of old people’s houses.’ The question was ‘What do you really like the most in life?’

“I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.”

At another point, while responding to the flattery of a beautiful, young female admirer, who quotes from his book, Jep says the sentiment he was expressing had been better written by the Italian prose master Alberto Moravia.

Born in 1907, Alberto Moravia achieved at 21 critical and commercial success with his first novel, The Time of Indifference, a cause célèbre eschewing middle-class mores. Before his death in 1990, he would publish over 40 novels, including The Conformist (1951), the adaptation of which in 1970 by Bernardo Bertolucci has the unusual distinction of being both a classic of post-war Italian cinema and of early-1970s zeitgeist.

In his recollections to the Paris Review, after Mussolini came to power, he struggled to get his books published (though Mussolini himself approved the 1940 publication of The Dream of the Lazy) and eventually fled for refuge to the Apennine mountains in 1943. He spent the war years trying to get his scandalous novels past Fascist censors:

I sent Agostino to them two months before the fall of Fascism, two months before the end. While all about them everything was toppling, falling to ruin, the Ministry of Popular Culture was doing business as usual. Approval looked not to be forthcoming; so one day I went up there, to Via Veneto — you know the place; they’re still there, incidentally; I know them all — to see what the trouble was. They told me that they were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to give approval to the book. My dossier was lying open on the desk, and when the secretary left the room for a moment I glanced at it. There was a letter from the Brazilian cultural attaché in it, some poet, informing the Minister that in Brazil I was considered a subversive. In Brazil of all places! But that letter, that alone, was enough to prevent the book’s publication.

Moravia himself spent most of the second half of the 20th century strolling along the Via dell’Oca (which means “Street of the Goose”). Anna Maria de Dominicis and Ben Johnson, in the introduction to his Paris Review interview, describe the street as “houses of working-class people: a line of narrow doorways with dark, dank little stairs, cramped windows, a string of tiny shops; the smells of candied fruit, repair shops, wines of the Castelli, engine exhaust” on one side and on the other side “the serene imperiousness of unchipped cornices and balconies overspilling with potted vines, tended creepers: homes of the well-to-do.” His fiction would explore both sides of Italy.

In an introduction to Moravia’s Boredom, William Weaver says, “Moravia was a great friend to walk with: a born Roman, he knew every brick of the city; even the most drab apartment block or the scruffiest little church could set a sparkling train of associations and memories. But, on encountering him, I would first, automatically, ask him how he was.

“’Mi annoio,’ he would usually reply, in his clipped telegraphic way.

“’I’m bored.’”

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NYRB Classics has recently republished Moravia’s early novella Agostino, in a fine translation by Michael F. Moore. Agostino is a young boy who has an unusually close attachment to his widowed mother, and the novel takes place during their extended stay at a beach resort. His sensitivity and jealousy drive them apart in the first chapters of the book, a closely reworked Swann’s Way:

Agostino’s mother was a big and beautiful woman still in her prime, and Agostino was filled with pride every time he got in the boat with her for one of their morning rides.

The novel, though, soon plunges from Proust into the hard-knock fringes of the beach resort. Driven away by his mother’s interest in a “tanned, dark-haired” young man, Agostino falls in with a group of working-class boys who are inarticulate, violent, inscrutable. He is drawn to them, as a kind of foil to his predictable upper-middle-class universe:

For a moment Agostino felt happy as he swam while the cold powerful stream tugged at his legs, and he forgot every hurt and every wrong. The boys were swimming in all directions, their heads and arms breaking through the smooth green surface. Their voices echoed clearly in the still air. Through the glassy transparency of the water, their bodies looked like white offshoots of plants that, rising to the surface from the darkness below, moved whichever way the current took them.

Eventually, the privileged Agostino whose home has 20 bedrooms (an unimaginable number for the other boys) begins to beg for change. He encounters a father and son, and the father unadvisedly takes the opportunity to teach his son about the have’s and have-not’s.

“And how old are you?” the man inquired.
“Thirteen,” said Agostino.
“You see,” said the man to his son, “this boy is almost the same age as you and he’s already working.” Then to Agostino, “Do you go to school?”
“I wish…but how can I?” replied Agostino, taking on the deceitful tone he had often heard the boys in the gang adopt to address similar questions. “I gotta make a living, mister.”
“You see,” the father turned to his son again, “this boy can’t go to school because he has to work, and you have the nerve to complain because you have to study?”

Moravia maintained an interest in intellectuals who rationalize their own impulsive behaviors and others’. In stark contrast to Agostino, his later novel, Contempt, rereleased a decade ago by NYRB Classics, features a first-person narrator, a screenwriter whose disgust for movie-writing is matched only by his wife’s inexplicable contempt for him. Throughout, the narrator interrogates his wife, and by extension the mystery of attraction itself:

Suddenly, the suspicion that she no longer loved me sprang into my mind again, in an abrupt, haunting sort of way, as a feeling of the impossibility of contact and communion between my body and hers…And I, like a person who suddenly realizes he is hanging over an abyss, felt a kind of painful nausea at the thought that our intimacy had turned for no reason at all, into estrangement, absence, separation.

Since so many of his themes touch on the unconscious and taboo sexuality, it might be surprising how skeptical his novels are to psychoanalytic techniques. Throughout Contempt, Moravia satirizes a character who has embraced a very schematic version of Freudianism.

Moravia suggests that ratiocination is a poor substitute for taste. One of his great themes is how sensibility is wrecked by negotiations with other people, other classes, other individuals, and thereby reinvigorated. As the screenwriter-narrator of Contempt says of his wife when she tells him she despises him, “It was the tone of the virgin word that springs directly from the thing itself and pronounced by someone who had perhaps never spoken that word before, and who, urged on by necessity, had fished it up from the ancestral depths of the language, without searching for it, almost involuntarily.”

Both Contempt and Agostino have an almost Neoclassical form, unlike, say, The Leopard. Lampedusa and Moravia point toward two very different directions for Italian fiction, though Contempt, a bracingly austere book that harkens back to naturalism, was published in 1954, and Lampedusa’s inventive, comic experiment was published in 1958.

Though his work deeply engaged with early-20th-century social and intellectual concerns, he claimed his fiction was informed most by the big “C” Canon. In his conversation with the Paris Review, he comes across as alternately fusty and cantankerous in his observations on the Moderns. He rejects O’Neill and Shaw as major dramatists because they “resorted to everyday language and, in consequence, by my definition failed to create true drama.”

If the first chapter takes off from Proust, the last movement of Agostino is a poignant revision of the ending of Sentimental Education. In Flaubert’s novel, Frédéric and Deslauriers, after several intervening years of disillusionment and disappointment, reminisce about a youthful visit to a brothel. During the visit, Frédéric becomes embarrassed and flees into the street, and his friend follows him. They are both seen coming out, and it causes a “local scandal which was still remembered three years later.” The novel ends with the two failed romantics remarking on the story:

“That was the happiest time we ever had,” said Frédéric.
“Yes, perhaps you’re right. That was the happiest time we ever had,” Deslauriers says.

In the final pages of his novella, Moravia has the prepubescent Agostino visit a brothel with his piggybank savings. When the encounter at the brothel predictably ends badly, he goes back home and demands of his mother that he be treated like a man. It is a moving depiction of a young person’s thwarted autonomy.

“But he wasn’t a man,” Moravia writes, “and many unhappy days would pass before he became one.”

"Books are solitudes in which we meet," Rebecca Solnit wrote. But before the meeting comes the solitude, the book as a private space that a reader steps into, and there are moments when escaping into a book is a bid for some measure of seclusion. If the solitude you crave at the moment is a quiet one, here’s a short reading list of quiet books that I've recently read and admired.